The importance of data has increased during the last decade while the cost of data storage medium has decreased, thus motivating data storage vendors to provide data protection schemes that are based upon duplication of data.
One of these protection schemes is known as mirroring. Mirroring involves repetitively generating one or more duplicates of data. A real mirror relationship can be established between one production (or primary) site and one or more remote (or secondary) sites. In a multiple remote site environment data from a single production site is mirrored on multiple remote sites.
The following patent and patent application, all being incorporated herein by reference provide various example of some state of the art data protection schemes: U.S. Pat. No. 6,957,362 of Armangau, U.S. patent application publication serial number 2005/0071708 of Bartfai et al. and U.S. patent application publication serial number 2003/0126387 of Watanabe.
There is a need to provide efficient methods, systems and computer program products for generating a consistent point in time copy of data.